Chaayos Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Cyber City Tea Café, Kulhads and Names in Chalk

Two IIT graduates and a chai craving in Houston.

Chaayos opened its first café in November 2012 at DLF Cyber City in Gurgaon, now Gurugram, Outlook Business reported in May 2016. Its founder is Nitin Saluja and his co-founder is Raghav Verma. Business Today, in a March 2015 profile, said the two had graduated from IIT Bombay in 2007 and IIT Delhi in 2010 respectively and met while working at the analytics firm Opera Solutions. Saluja left in 2012 to start the chain on his own savings; Verma, a keen baker who had tried an online education venture in the meantime, joined about six months after the first store opened, taking an equity stake. Several of the snacks on the early menu were his recipes, the magazine said.

Saluja told Business Today that the idea came while he was working in Houston. After a breakfast out he wanted a home-style ginger chai, and realised that in India the only option in the same situation would have been a roadside dhaba. He also put the positioning simply: people go to a coffee chain for a seat and Wi-Fi, and he wanted them to come to Chaayos for the tea. The company trades as Chaayos; its own careers page names the legal entity as Sunshine Teahouse Private Limited.

The first outlet doubled as a testing ground. Verma told Outlook Business that the Cyber City café drew a strong response in its first month and that new food and chai items followed once customers had tried the core range. By March 2015 Business Today counted eight outlets in the National Capital Region, among them a café in the Safdarjung Development Area of South Delhi, across the road from IIT Delhi. By May 2016 Outlook Business counted 25, two in Mumbai and 23 in Delhi NCR, with stores at DLF Promenade, Connaught Place, Bandra and Juhu.

Desi chai, built to order.

The menu is built around home-style Indian tea rather than coffee. Business Today listed about 25 variants in 2015, from ginger-basil and cardamom chai to experiments such as mirchi chai, aam papad chai and a Pahadi chai modelled on Kashmiri kahwa, alongside snacks such as bun maska, vada pao and keema pao. Verma told Outlook Business in 2016 that the “desi chai” could take up to 12 add-ons and be customised in about 12,000 ways, and that around 80 per cent of orders were for milk teas, with kulhad chai and lemongrass among the others.

Behind the counter the model is centralised. Outlook Business reported a central kitchen in each of Delhi and Mumbai, where tea blends were prepared and sent out to the cafés, and kiosks selling chai to go in IT parks in Noida. From early on Saluja described Chaayos as “a tea company not a tea retail company”: Business Today noted in 2015 that Chaayos blends were already sold in packs through modern retail and online marketplaces. The company’s own online shop now sells instant tea premixes, chai masala and green teas under the Chaayos name.

Scale came later. World Coffee Portal reported that Chaayos reached its 100th store in September 2021 and opened its 200th café, in Bengaluru, in July 2022. In February 2024 the same publication described the New Delhi-based chain as operating more than 200 stores across India, with a menu that included kulhad chai, kesar chai and masala chai.

The menu has since widened beyond tea. World Coffee Portal reported in February 2024 that Chaayos was trialling filter coffee and black coffee at selected stores in the capital and had launched its first range of cold drinks in January 2024, as part of a pilot of upgraded stores.

Design and documentation.

Several of the Indian sweet-shop, snack and restaurant chains in this guide began at a single counter or kitchen. Some keep the name of a founding town or family, and the shopfront, the sweet box and the takeaway bag carry that name long after the business has spread beyond its home city. Some, like Bikanervala, keep a second name for the packed snacks they sell in shops, so that the restaurant and the pack can live side by side.

The menu is usually the clearest part of the identity. Chains in this group present themselves through named dishes and drinks: bhujia and kaju katli, momos, vada pav, masala chai, barbecue platters, dosa and idli, or cakes and brownies. Their websites group products by those names rather than by ingredient, and many add gift boxes and festive ranges to the everyday menu.

Networks are published by the companies themselves, as outlet lists, city pages and franchise forms for domestic and international partners, and they change often. Some brands have moved from street-facing shops to delivery-only kitchens that carry no signage at all, which leaves the pack, the app listing and the social feed to do the work of a shopfront. Where a count is given in this guide, it is dated and attributed.

Ownership ranges from family businesses run by a second or third generation to groups that hold several restaurant brands and to companies listed on an Indian stock exchange. Corporate pages describe founders, owners and franchise networks; this guide sets those claims beside dated reporting in the business and trade press, and keeps each company’s own account clearly marked as its own.

Clay cups, chalked names and handmade art.

The object most closely tied to Chaayos is the kulhad, the unglazed clay cup. Visiting the Safdarjung Development Area café in 2015, Business Today described tea arriving in kulhads with each customer’s name written on the cup in chalk, a small piece of personalisation that turns a plain vessel into a branded one. In February 2024 World Coffee Portal reported that the company’s trials of upgraded stores included ceramic cups in place of paper and a refreshed café design.

The company says each of its cafés is designed individually. One example on record is the café at Worldmark in Aerocity, Delhi, designed by Sync Design Studio and described by the retail-design magazine Retail4Growth in September 2025. The studio’s principal architect, Sandeep Dang, told the magazine that the starting point was what Chaayos should mean to people as it grew, and that the answer was a café that felt Indian because chai is Indian. The art was commissioned by hand from artisans: a Phulkari-inspired weave in green that alludes to tea gardens, Warli-style drawings of tea being picked and processed, and a scene in the manner of a Mughal miniature showing royals drinking chai in a palace courtyard.

The furniture follows the same line, with cane and wood chairs with brass details, Chandigarh-inspired seats and leather sofas made for the café, under a ceiling of woven cane and acoustic panels. Mirrors at the ends of the rafters make the small room read as deeper, and a verandah-style seating area framed with shrubs sits outside.

For a design guide, Chaayos shows how a tea chain can build an identity from everyday Indian objects, the clay cup, a chalked name and commissioned craft, rather than from coffee-shop conventions. Compare Chai Point, the tea chain founded in Bengaluru in 2010, and Starbucks, the kind of coffee chain Saluja set Chaayos against. For this guide we use a kulhad terracotta, a tea-leaf green and brass on milk-tea cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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